Study: AI Facilitating the Digital Progression of Worldwide Sectors
According to a report published by the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies on Thursday, China boasts nearly 10,000 digitalized workshops and smart factories across the country, showcasing the significant impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing industry digitalization.
TroibNews 
According to a report from the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies released on Thursday, China boasts nearly 10,000 digitalized workshops and smart factories across the country, underscoring the significant impact of artificial intelligence on industrial digitalization.
Within this total, 421 factories have been recognized as national-level smart manufacturing demonstration facilities, with 90 percent implementing technologies like AI and digital twins. This information comes from the China Internet Development Report 2024, which was presented during the ongoing 2024 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit in the historic water town of Wuzhen, located in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.
The report reviews China's progress in various areas, including information infrastructure, the digital economy, cybersecurity, and lawful cyberspace governance.
Additionally, it highlighted that as of the end of 2023, China recorded 378,000 valid AI invention patents, achieving a remarkable year-on-year increase exceeding 40 percent—1.4 times the global average growth rate.
From 2014 to 2023, China led the world by filing over 38,000 generative AI patent applications. The generative AI landscape is experiencing rapid expansion, with more than 100 large-scale models featuring over 1 billion parameters in the country as of March 2024.
AI's applications continue to broaden across various industries, with tailored large models enhancing sectors such as electronics, healthcare, and transportation. This trend has resulted in the creation of hundreds of application models, facilitating the digital transformation and modernization of traditional industries.
For example, Alibaba Group aims to make its self-developed large models open source. Currently, over 100 open-source models are available on Qwen, Alibaba Cloud's dedicated language model, with total downloads surpassing 40 million, as noted by Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, during the summit.
As of the end of September, more than 8 million developers are actively involved in model development and applications in Alibaba's AI open model community, "ModelScope." Making these models open source has significantly reduced barriers to AI development and adoption across multiple sectors, accelerating the use of AI in various scenarios, according to Wu.
Similarly, Baidu's ERNIE Agent has enhanced the capabilities of its ERNIE foundation model, resulting in widespread applications across diverse industries and attracting over 800,000 developers and 150,000 enterprises, as reported by Wang Haifeng, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu.
"For example, we collaborated with academician Zhu Youyong from the Chinese Academy of Engineering and his team to develop the 'Farmer Academician Agent' based on the ERNIE foundation model," Wang explained, emphasizing that it integrates Zhu's agricultural research and knowledge to offer farmers real-time support on matters such as planting methods and pest management.
Data from the market research firm International Data Corporation indicates that the market size for China's large-model platforms and related applications reached 1.77 billion yuan in 2023.
The World Internet Development Report 2024, also unveiled at the summit, pointed out that the favorable future outlook for industries powered by AI has drawn significant investment in AI research from the industrial sector.
In 2023, the industry contributed 51 notable machine learning models, whereas the academic sector produced only 15. This disparity in resources—specifically, limited access to funding, data, and computational power within academia—has led to a talent migration towards the industry, further entrenching its leadership in AI research and development.
The two reports mentioned have been published consecutively for eight years, highlighting the outcomes of the WIC since 2017.
The summit, themed "Embracing a people-centered and AI-for-good digital future—building a community with a shared future in cyberspace," commenced on Wednesday and is set to conclude on Friday.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
Within this total, 421 factories have been recognized as national-level smart manufacturing demonstration facilities, with 90 percent implementing technologies like AI and digital twins. This information comes from the China Internet Development Report 2024, which was presented during the ongoing 2024 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit in the historic water town of Wuzhen, located in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.
The report reviews China's progress in various areas, including information infrastructure, the digital economy, cybersecurity, and lawful cyberspace governance.
Additionally, it highlighted that as of the end of 2023, China recorded 378,000 valid AI invention patents, achieving a remarkable year-on-year increase exceeding 40 percent—1.4 times the global average growth rate.
From 2014 to 2023, China led the world by filing over 38,000 generative AI patent applications. The generative AI landscape is experiencing rapid expansion, with more than 100 large-scale models featuring over 1 billion parameters in the country as of March 2024.
AI's applications continue to broaden across various industries, with tailored large models enhancing sectors such as electronics, healthcare, and transportation. This trend has resulted in the creation of hundreds of application models, facilitating the digital transformation and modernization of traditional industries.
For example, Alibaba Group aims to make its self-developed large models open source. Currently, over 100 open-source models are available on Qwen, Alibaba Cloud's dedicated language model, with total downloads surpassing 40 million, as noted by Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, during the summit.
As of the end of September, more than 8 million developers are actively involved in model development and applications in Alibaba's AI open model community, "ModelScope." Making these models open source has significantly reduced barriers to AI development and adoption across multiple sectors, accelerating the use of AI in various scenarios, according to Wu.
Similarly, Baidu's ERNIE Agent has enhanced the capabilities of its ERNIE foundation model, resulting in widespread applications across diverse industries and attracting over 800,000 developers and 150,000 enterprises, as reported by Wang Haifeng, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu.
"For example, we collaborated with academician Zhu Youyong from the Chinese Academy of Engineering and his team to develop the 'Farmer Academician Agent' based on the ERNIE foundation model," Wang explained, emphasizing that it integrates Zhu's agricultural research and knowledge to offer farmers real-time support on matters such as planting methods and pest management.
Data from the market research firm International Data Corporation indicates that the market size for China's large-model platforms and related applications reached 1.77 billion yuan in 2023.
The World Internet Development Report 2024, also unveiled at the summit, pointed out that the favorable future outlook for industries powered by AI has drawn significant investment in AI research from the industrial sector.
In 2023, the industry contributed 51 notable machine learning models, whereas the academic sector produced only 15. This disparity in resources—specifically, limited access to funding, data, and computational power within academia—has led to a talent migration towards the industry, further entrenching its leadership in AI research and development.
The two reports mentioned have been published consecutively for eight years, highlighting the outcomes of the WIC since 2017.
The summit, themed "Embracing a people-centered and AI-for-good digital future—building a community with a shared future in cyberspace," commenced on Wednesday and is set to conclude on Friday.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
